I jacked into the matrix, not knowing my greatest challenge was just around the corner.
It all started when I got a message from this guy. "Come join me on this new grid," he said. "It will change the way you see."
"See what?" I asked.
"Everything."
So I believed him. I mean, you put the trodes on every couple hours, you get a feel for when someone is making a massive pile of shit. He wasn't. Something had him really excited.
"Welcome to Tulips and Daisies, a Combat Simulator," said the NetVoice as I jacked into the plasticube chip I had printed out from the guy's plans. You know back in the twentieth century, when people still got married? They had these things called rings, little metal circles they wore on their fingers. They were tough to get off, so fidelity was insured (although it wasn't). Look it up on the 'Net sometime.
Well, this place was that and more. Three rings, octagonal pleasure polygons, each around the next. The wireframe cybermatrix gave way to textures I had never seen before, like I had just landed in the world's oldest and cleanest sewer.
I started running around what looked like the outside circle--I could see the NetCity sky ablaze in the background, although in these combat simulators, the sky can be plastered on surfaces you never knew existed--and noticed periodic doors leading only inward. Ten frenzied hacking attempts later, I realized something.
The doors were slow going--I'm talking kilohertz of speed, here.
So I stood by patiently, and then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Whether it was in my ring, or on the one I wanted to enter, I would find out soon enough. As soon as the intricate incandescent lines forming foreign patterns cleared on the door locks, I squeezed through the small opening and stumbled onto a cache of slick energy weapons. Fry your brain, that's what they do, and someone had already picked one up before me.
I was in deep shit.
The movement I had seen a second before was from my motion sensor (a neat addition to the combat program, something I should have thought of myself, but the other guy had added it ahead of time). Somewhere in that same ring, he was running top speed like I was, looking for me as I looked for him. I decided to look at the last cybermetric ring and slapped a door, knowing I could run two laps before it actually opened. And what did I see through the thin crack on my first pass? A flash of red, the wire-suit of my opponent and fellow hacker.
Two shots later, and he was smoking in his circuit chair somewhere back in the meatserver we call the Real World.